Thursday, February 4, 2010

Endymion place-marking ALREADY?

Over on the Mid-City mailing list (always a hotbed of intrigue and entertainment), Orleans Avenue-adjacent resident Chris Romero reports that people are already staking out their spots on the Endymion parade route.

The parade is nine days away. NINE DAYS.

Wrote Chris:

I'm as eager as the next guy to celebrate the roll of Endymion, but this has escalated into a problem of mass proportions. The practice of parking cube vans in the area, filled with kegs and ice, has increased exponentially. These vans are often used as makeshift port-a-potties once empty. You don't even want to know what that's like. There are fights, there is property damage, there is urination on houses and in alleys. In a surprising twist last year, this element added a new level of public indecency: couples having sex both on the neutral ground on the night before and in the surrounding blocks the day of. I kid you not. This has not just gotten out of control. It's a plague. If it's not enough to just be pushed out of sitting on the parade route, this litany of offenses has mounted to unprecedented levels. Imagine Bourbon St without all the pesky laws and controls....

In the past decade, where has it gone? To spraypaint and caution tape. Today, I was shocked to find three spaces marked off in the first block off Carrollton. That's a full 9 days before the parade.

We've got an email out to Chris to talk about this, but in the meantime: What do you think of the practice of staking out parade spaces days in advance? And has it gotten worse in recent years? (Feel free to kvetch about Ladder Etiquette as well.)